2234 Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

by

Patreon
Subscribestar
Comic Vote
Reddit
Wiki
Twitter @betweenfailures
Contact me for a Discord invite.

On of the oldest friends of the comic is doing a Kickstarter. She’s been supportive for almost the entire time I’ve been making Between Failures. I would appreciate it if you gave her efforts your attention.
Hallowtines Kickstarter.

Back in the day, when I was still working in the store the one in the comic is based on, I sold a lot of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books. I never saw any of those people improve their finances in any way. My suspicion is that the only person doing better was the man writing the books. That said, I don’t actually know if the advice in the books was any good. Maybe if you do what it says you can become rich. My instinct is still that my $14 would be better spent on almost anything else though…

63 Comments

Aaaaaaand there it is. Shitty Dad, everyone.
Honestly I get that he thinks he is trying his best but I never get that kind of people. That kind of advice just sounds like “I dont particularly give a shit whether you are hapoy or not, as long as it is generally good for everybody in the long run. But aside from that I love ya son!”
Like shit, do those people even hear themselves?

Unfortunately, it’s often a cultural thing. My dad is full Asian, and he only ever made friends if they could do something for him, and he was always doing things for them so he could call in favors later, and that’s not only common in many Asian countries but actually approved of. Here in the west, we care a lot more about personal happiness (or at least our culture does), so the idea of that kind of relationship feels wrong and dishonest.

It just depends on what values are important in that person’s heritage and background. This is the sort of man who thinks that being a good father means being able to provide for his family perfectly and that bonds between himself and family members are secondary. It’s not surprising to me that he believes one would be happier in the long run if the only factor one married for is wealth.

To be fair, he did not say that wealth should be the *only* factor in choosing a mate.

To be fair, that’s also not what I said. I said “if” the only factor was wealth, he believed that you would be happier marrying wealthy than marrying poor, which he also implied in his last line.

It’s a fairly common mindset, especially for that age group.

That aside, he was also making points about then aside from that: friendly family, hard workers, civic minded. Clearly these are also traits his father cares about as well.

Also, double on that asian family thing, I have a side of the family like that as well. I was cut out of the will because I joined the military and became an engineer instead of a doctor. Mind you my grandmother didn’t do this, but my uncle did soon as she died, and my father had just died previously, leaving me and my little brother with nothing from that (very wealthy) side of our family.

At first I I thought they were going down the your grandad would love this route. But nope he turned into a money grabber. Hang in there Reggie

If this is Dad is like, I can only imagine what mom is like…

I mean… They’ve hinted at it in the past. Back when Reggie was seen as more of an antagonist, they reference his mother a lot. None of it was positive. It’s no wonder why Reggie acts and thinks the way he does most of the time. Fortunately, recently he has been turning himself around a bit, and showing off his more redeeming qualities. And as far as I have seen, his sister has generally been a good person so far. So the kids are starting to break away from their family traditions, wittingly or not. It makes Reggie so much more compelling than he was before, and has a lot of people rooting for him compared to when he was just the dick that tried getting Ed fired.

My favorite part is how he only cares about her money

He also cares about her civic-mindedness and her work ethic. Lot of people from old money have no work ethic.

Heck a lot of the people who are “Investors” that I run into in my line of work don’t have much in the way of ethics to begin with.

You must have a big, Napoleon complex- to choose, or keep, the name- “Caesar”.
Anyone want Genghis Kahn, for a baby name? :)

What’s wrong with Caesar? We’ve been using it for millennia at this point. There can only be so many Johns before things get boring.

*sheds salty tears*
Me is sorry. ^^;
I guess I’m biased against the name, Caesar, after seeing Julius Caesar had been so mean, to “Asterix the Gaul”. :D

True that.

Turns out that my mum wanted to give me at least one if not more middle names. I am fairly sure Constantine was one and I think Octavius (or was it Odin?) was another.
I still sometimes contemplate adding them and have my middle initials be O.C.

Kidding, not kidding

Media is an influence on such things. Naming your kid Kahn could be fun if you can do a William Shatner imitation. It may also be a regional thing. Living in the Southwest corner of the country I’ve met a few Caesars through the years.

Heh, heh!

Ilike that idea.
Do you think my imaginary son would like it, if I name him Mr. Sulu, or Han Solo?…or The Hulk? (eep!)

ugh, daaaaaaad
stop it with the medieval mindset lol

The medieval mindset would be, “You’ll marry whom I tell you to, to cement a solid alliance with France, or I’ll take your head!”

Bingo. You’re either into history or a CK3 player, I take it?

(Actually if you were a CK3 player your answer would’ve had about 80% more incest, lol.)

Robert Kiosaky, the rich dad, poor dad guy has some stuff online at the moment. It gives an impression of his thinking. At first it looks like suitable advice to get into an entrepreneurial mindset, challenge oneself, take nothing for granted, crunch the numbers, but he stops at the threshold of having his own business and defending it against anything and anyone. I.e. zero awareness of cooperation or purpose. His response to how to get through the crisis is individualistic – make sure you have your team of lawyers and accountants together and sue people to defend your wealth.
He’s just shrugs off critical questions and laughs at phrases, which are socially destructive – and when thoughtfulness would be an appropriate choice. E.g.: They will raise the taxes, but rich people don’t pay taxes.
It starts out intriguing, but ultimately is emotionally and intellectually limited.
If it clashes with your personality you may not get much out of it, but some business startup principles are in there. Co-author with Donald Trump.

I shouldn’t judge based on the freely available stuff and interviews online, but I did not find much depth in it and some socially harmful beliefs (which will easily get you into mental conflicts down the road of entrepreneurship).

Back in the 90s to early 00s, I did copyediting and project management on a raft of those business-fad-of-the-month books. Pretty much rewrote a few of them. They’re the business-market equivalent of diet and self-help books, and IMO, they are all horseshit. Publishing in general is not very profitable, and publishers tried (with reason) to sell all the crap anyone would buy to keep the whole thing afloat, which subsidized the costs of the better stuff.

That shop did the composition on some of Trump’s books, too. Think I proofread one or two of them. He was a jerk then, and my opinion of him has not improved.

I agree with that. I think publishing doesn’t pay much.

Also, I remember seeing a show about being an author.
IMO, being an author of printed books doesn’t pay much.
IMO, being an author of non-fiction is one of the fine arts, and 1] you have to work harder than Hercules to have an author job, or 2] be an author [for 20 hr.s a week], + have a full time job to give you a comfortable and/or middle class salary.

In other words by 1990s figures: write a mystery book, like “The Cat Who Saw RED”, + for every paperback book you sell…you get paid 50 CENTS for it, + for every hardback you sell, you get $1 for it.

So, IMO, unless you’ve really doing well, + are writing a Harry Potter -like series, being a print-book author doesn’t pay you a lot.

Short form- get a job that pays all of your bills, + pays for your your retirement, + then be an artist or writer as a side job, is probably the best way to have an art job.

Unless I wasn’t clear-
if your books sell from a mainstream publisher- you get 50 cents as a commission for every time you sell a copy of your paperback book, + you get $1 (USD) / one dollar every time you sell a hardcover copy of you book.

Needing a team of lawyers to defend your wealth sounds like a classic case of the corrupt capitalist to me. You don’t really succeed by living in a success bubble. Sometimes, you have to deal with the down and dirty stuff to reassure your success whether you like it or not.

I encountered a fascinating book a fewbyears ago called “The Craft of Power”. It described how to gain power. Near the beginning it carried a warning — that before you start applying the techniques in thd book, make sure that power is what you really want. Because the method will change you and you may not like the consequences.

Perspective: the “valuable” commodity for which everyone trades youth. The value of perspective tends to be inversely related to how much youth the person still has.

It feels like everyone is giving Reggie’s dad a hard time, because they think he’s saying: “Love a rich woman only”; But he’s not. He’s saying “Between a rich woman and a poor woman, you can love both but the rich one will be more tolerable when you fall out of love”. He never told Reggie that only the rich are worthy to love. And frankly he’s right.

We don’t like to talk about it, because movies and stories have led us to believe love is enduring and eternal, but at some point down the line it becomes less and less passionate love and more of habit and tolerance. Marriages are built on a foundation of someone you love enough to sleep well, and have a passionate history together. Not on eternal enduring passion that lasts into your 80s. So when you have a lot of young passion for someone, then it’s best to take a step back and think what it’ll be like when that passion eventually dies down.

But no one likes a pragmatist, so I can’t really blame people for their reaction to Reggie’s dad.

Thank you! This is a really good point.
I also think the perspective changes when you look at it from the point of view of the father. I’ve got two kids. Do I hope they marry people they love? Yes, of course. But what keeps me up at night is not whether they have love in their hearts so much as whether or not they have food in their stomachs. And younger people sometimes seem to have trouble concentrating on both things.

Reggie’s parents are rich; it stands to reason they’d want him to be involved with someone from an equally affluent family, because whether we like it or not there is a cultural difference between the wealthy and the less so. And since it’s the granddaughter of a family friend, she’s less of an unknown quantity.

My issue is that buddy’s coming on real strong to “sort of dating”.

To be fair, they are dating. It’s a weird relationship given Maddison is there, but they are exploring one another’s likes and dislikes. It’s not like dating necessarily must be exclusive, or require you to officially announce it as such, because you can learn enough about your compatibility without those things.

But I agree that Reggie didn’t mention loving her. Though it seems more like dad is giving advice for the future.

I wholeheartedly agree. Mr. Boothe strikes me, at the moment, as if he’s giving out sage advice that’s worded poorly, thus easily misunderstood, but is actually very valuable.

I had a friend in high school/college who was really into those Rich Dad Poor Dad books, and he gave me one to read. And I could see where someone could get rich following the guidelines in that book, but I personally don’t have it in me to do that.
I might be remembering it incorrectly, (it was 10-15 years ago,) but as I recall, the advice was to basically stop paying for “frivolous” purchases, (vacations, nice things for yourself) and funnel that money into buying real estate which you would then rent to people. You’d pay the mortgage out of the rent and do any maintenance or repairs that were needed yourself to save money. Over time as the mortgages paid off, you’d start getting that rent as pure income. (Which again, you’d funnel into buying more property, I guess?)
Like I said, I can see how you *could* eventually make money off of it, but it seemed like it would involve a lot of lean living and spending all your free time fixing other people’s toilets until you got there. It’s not for me.

I never really liked those kinds of financial advice as it seems to indicate that being a landlord is a foregone conclusion to a successful venture. Even if you were to buy out property and rent it off, you’re still subject to the receiving edge of the sword in all rental based economies: Inflation, rent disputes, squatting, property taxes, uninvited guests, the whole nine yards. It’s not as easy as pie as some of those so-called “success” books want to leave you to believe.

And don’t get me started on property flipping schemes.

Tru-dat!

My dad tried buying several rental properties, and ended up losing money because the damage deposit never covered the costs of repairs after the occupant left (I say “occupant” because they rarely paid the rent!)

My father has that exact same mindset. He thinks that I should only date girls who come from well-off families who carry good ethics and discipline. In addition, he’s the kind of person who does favors for his friends and family and expects a million favors back as he thinks they “owe” him. And when they don’t communicate with him on a frequent basis, he begins to moan that they’re not being considerate and being nothing more than self-centered bastards.

I sincerely get where he’s coming from but at the same time, he also needs to realize that he’s not king of the world. It’s bad enough that I have to hear this shit from him every second day.

“Food in their stomachs”
Honestly, this is one reason I am for conscription. Turn 18, join the military, the Peace Corps, or serve in some similar capacity domestically.
Too many of us have never had to grind through hunger and cold without hope of relief. I know people go to ‘boot camps’ and love ti talk about the perspective it gave them, but have no idea what it is like to live like that without an expectation of anything better.

But is that even precisely what the military is FOR? It’s one thing to be put in to be taught discipline and respect, it’s another thing entirely to use what is taught to gun down foreigners in the name of protecting political agendas under the guise of “national security” or “national interest”.

There’s a famous army, and or military, quotation:

Join the Army!
In the Army you:

Travel to exotic lands,
Learn new cultures,
Meet new people….and kill them.

Haha wow to the hate. Not gonna judge. My grandpa always said money isn’t a reason to fall in love. But it’s a helluva tiebreaker.

He’s not saying rich only, he’s saying hold on. 2 and 3 were hard worker and civic minded. They run a library for crying out loud. Yet everyone only cares about the money. Shallow irony :P

As of right now, I’m withholding what I think of Mr. Boothe for a future post. It feels like another shoe is waiting to drop and I don’t like it.

Lots seem to be missing that he says that’s good. Perfectly fine. Father could just be making suggestions, that there is more to look at than “I like this person”

Not like parents will tell their daughters, “Sure he’s poor and has a terrible work ethic, but he’s fine” :p

For a guy like Reggie’s dad, “old money” doesn’t necessarily mean bad, or negative. It could simply mean he sees them as hard working, and smart enough to not waste there money on whatever fashionable trend comes up. I remember reading about a guy whose father gave him the advice “cooking lasts, kissing don’t.” Which seems to be Reggie’s dad mindset (kind of).

The way I see this page, Reggie’s dad is happy that his son has a girlfriend first and foremost with her family’s wealth being second to that. If he cared solely about the money, he would not have used “hard workers” or “civic minded” to describe her family. That shows that his mindset is of if you want something, you have to earn it. If he didn’t have that mindset, Reggie wouldn’t have need for a job since he would have had everything handed to him.

Often times the role is the parent not wanting the daughter to get with the poor, jobless guy.

No one bats an eye.

This is the same thing, only the father is saying it to his son.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.